Claude · Terms
These definitions are how stutklit uses words inside the field guide. They are working terms for qualitative marketing research, not legal definitions and not a measurement standard. Where a word is easy to inflate — market, most buyers, ROI — the entry says what this guide refuses to let it mean.
claude is the name of the field routine published here: interview someone who can refuse a B2B purchase, observe a touchpoint they already use, and synthesize the repeated friction into positioning language. A claude note states its vantage point. It does not promise payback, and it does not treat the people who answered as a representative sample. The practice is spelled Claude when it is a title and claude when it is the index term.
The set of people who can advance, reshape, or stop a purchase. Not a persona, and not “the customer.” Roles inside it are interviewed separately. See decision-maker interviews.
Someone whose yes, no, or delay had weight in a specific purchase. Authority is shown by the last decision, not by a title on a badge. Several decision-makers can sit in one buying group.
The person who can commit or withhold the budget, or who must live with the number in a forecast they sign. They may speak less than the champion and decide more.
The person spending internal political capital to move a purchase. A valuable narrator and a biased one. A study made only of champions describes the winning speech.
A role that can hold the file: security, legal, procurement, finance, or an operator with a practical veto. “Blocker” is not an insult. It is a job in the decision. Their phrases belong in the language bank.
A place the buying group already handles the decision: a thread, a form, a standup, a shortlist spreadsheet, a renewal call, a reception desk. Mapped in touchpoint fieldwork. Not a marketing channel you wish they used.
A repeated mechanism that stalls a yes: proof, consensus, switching, timing, or doubt that the problem belongs to a product at all. Named from scenes and sentences, not from a mood. Sorted in purchase friction.
The speaker’s words, in their order, inside quotation marks. The only kind of line that may be read back as a test of positioning. Paraphrase must be labeled or it will be mistaken for this.
A teaching story built from the shape of several decisions, labeled as a composite. It is not a case study of a named account and not a frequency. Readers may not lift a number out of it, because it has none.
The point at which new conversations repeat a friction you can already narrate, and you can also describe an exception. Saturation of a small design is not statistical representativeness. The design rule is in research design.
A sentence a buyer could repeat: the job, the real alternative, and the friction you are willing to be about, with the limit attached. Not a claim of payback or of how “most” companies buy. Written in positioning synthesis.
How you were present: interview, invited room, public artifact, or secondhand retelling. A Claude note that hides this is asking to be trusted as more than it is. Observation rules sit in market observation.
Teams collapse these into “we did some research.” The table is a reminder of what each move can carry back to a memo, and what it must leave behind. None of the three produces a market rate.
| Move | It can support | It cannot support |
|---|---|---|
| Interview | A chronology, a role map, verbatim lines, the alternative they used. | What people do when they are not narrating. A share of a segment. |
| Observation | Sequence, artifact, silence, who held the pen in that room. | Why it mattered, unless someone will say so. Incidence in a market. |
| Synthesis | One sentence tied to a friction, an alternative, and a limit. | A forecast of revenue, a census, a slogan with no card behind it. |
If you are choosing where to begin, start with the move you have been using as a substitute for the other two. A workshop that only synthesizes is a design problem. A stack of call recordings with no language bank is an interview that was never written down. The shelf starts on the home page of this guide.
The design chapter turns this vocabulary into a limits paragraph you can put on page one.